Web Coverage Service

1) Overview

This document specifies how a Web Coverage Service (WCS) offers multi-dimensional coverage data for access over the Internet. This document specifies a core set of requirements that a WCS implementation must fulfill. WCS extension standards add further functionality to this core; some of these are required in addition to the core to obtain a complete implementation. This document indicates which extensions, at a minimum, need to be considered in ad-dition to this core to allow for a complete WCS implementation. This core does not prescribe support for any particular coverage encoding format. This also holds for GML as a coverage delivery format: while GML constitutes the canonical format for the definition of WCS, it is not required by this core that a concrete instance of a WCS service implements the GML coverage format. WCS extensions specifying use of data encoding formats in the context of WCS are designed in a way that the GML coverage information contents specified in this core is consistent with the contents of an encoded coverage.